A Many Colored Kingdom

Multicultural Dynamics for Spiritual Formation

Conde-Frazier, Elizabeth, Kang, S. Steve, Parrett, Gary A.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781585583577
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

How do ethnic and cultural diversity affect spiritual formation? The authors of A Many Colored Kingdom explore Christian formation and teaching in the church, with a particular focus on intercultural and interethnic relationships.
Well-qualified to speak on issues of diversity, the authors describe relevant aspects of their own personal journeys; key issues emerging from their studies and teaching germane to race, culture, and ethnicity; and teaching implications that bring right practice to bear on church ministry. A final chapter contains a conversation among the authors responding to one another's insights and concerns.
This book will be required reading for those engaged in as well as those preparing for a life of teaching and ministry in our increasingly multicultural world.

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Three Stories

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ELIZABETH CONDE-FRAZIER, S. STEVE KANG, AND GARY A. PARRETT

Elizabeth’s Story: Two Vignettes

What brings me to the task of writing about multicultural Christian education? Perhaps I can best describe it with two vignettes. The first is one in which I am in a nondominant position. The second is one in which as a Protestant Christian I have power because I represent the dominant religious view. Eric H. F. Law speaks of how in different situations we are in positions of power or powerlessness.[1] As a teacher, I am in a position of power over my students, but as a person who is labeled a minority in this country, I have experienced powerlessness through disenfranchisement and discrimination. Both of these experiences have taught me valuable lessons about ministry in a multicultural world. Each one is an expression of the passions that bring me to the work of this writing.

Powerlessness as Invisibility

It was a cold January day in New York City. The ice-covered streets were treacherous, but the funeral home was full, and more people kept coming. The ministers stood together in the front. They were there from every Hispanic Baptist church in the city. A taxi rolled into the parking lot. The door opened and a frail, older woman emerged with a walker. She was helped up the few stairs into the building and began looking for a chair in the already too crowded room. Patiently, she looked down every row in the dimly lit room.

My father saw her, and they exchanged words of greeting, she in her soft quivering voice and he in broken English. He quickly made room for her at the end of our row, where the family was seated. She, a stranger, sat next to me. The service began. It was my mother’s funeral service.

In 1959, my mother had gone back to work to help with the family income. The first day of her new job she was excited and nervous but happy to be working for the Lord. She was to be the secretary in the office of the Spanish department of the denomination.

That same night as we ate dinner my mother cried as she ate. She told my father in whispers that the women where she worked had treated her poorly. They had not spoken to her. She had been surprised and deeply disappointed by the discrimination and prejudice evident even in the church. My father could not believe it. “ But, honey, how can this be? This is the church!” His confusion and disbelief questioned the credibility of my mother’s observations, her interpretation of the events of her first day at work.

Future dinner conversations revolved around the continuing story of my mother and the women she worked with. They would not speak to her, but they spoke about her while she was present. They said things that hurt her, called her names, and made accusations about things she had not done.

Now, fifteen years later I was at her funeral. During the service, a difficult moment made my tears well up, and they flowed on to my lap. Silently, a white, wrinkled hand slipped over mine. It felt soft yet firm with strength, and with it she carried me through that moment. It was difficult to receive this strength, for I was trying to be strong on my own, but I appreciated it. She quietly reclaimed her hand as she felt me grow calm.

At the end of the service she said, “I had to come. I could not stay away. I had to pay my respects.” She sat down again to regain her own strength. I sat with her. She then told me her story. “When your mother came to work for the Spanish department, her office space was adjacent to mine. I and the other women who worked there were insulted by the fact that she worked alongside us as if she were like us. We did cruel things. We blamed her when the community kitchen was left dirty, and we called her names that I do not wish to repeat, for they are lies. We never spoke to her, and we used notes to communicate only what was work related. It must have been very difficult to work with us. She, in turn, started to leave our favorite pastries on the right-hand corner of our desks every morning. She used the prison of silence we created for her to listen to our needs and wants. She got to know us very well. She gave us birthday cards and holiday cards. She cleaned and decorated the kitchen all the time. We were relentless in our campaign to keep her in her place lest she believe she could be like us. The truth was that she was faster at the typewriter, never making mistakes. She took shorthand and could do accounting. Everything she did was done perfectly, and we became even angrier. How could a spic be so smart?” She puckered her lips and looked into a corner of the room where soggy umbrellas stood draining into the thin, soiled carpet.

“After the first year, she started to write us notes with prayers every morning. Sometimes a Scripture verse accompanied them; other times they contained a short meditation that she had copied. Each one was different, custom-made to our needs. Then I remember a fierce winter. It snowed and became icy, much worse than today. Dorothy had problems with her legs, and we had to walk up a hill from the subway station. She complained about it one day, and would you believe it? Your mother was there waiting for Dorothy the very next morning. Dorothy said your mother offered her arm to support her and walked with her all the way without one single word. She did that every day until the snow and ice melted. Who could resist her?”

My storyteller companion was Mrs. Campbell, a woman who had worked with my mother for nine years. She was living in Poughkeepsie, New York, and had come all the way in a taxi that was waiting to take her back. A pretty penny that must have cost her.

She continued her account of recollections. “All we knew were the habits and patterns of our prejudices, but slowly she taught us new patterns of compassion. She broke the power of our habits and led us into new ways. At first, we could not understand, but we followed and began to see with her eyes the love of Christ. The new habits emptied us of our prejudices, our fears. We made room for all of us.” Mrs. Campbell got up slowly and walked over to the casket. She touched my mother’s hand, and I saw her mouth some words. Then she turned and left.

I understood my mother’s story, but I had lived it differently. It is the story of invisibility. Invisibility means not being seen, to be indistinguishable. It is to be too small to be seen, like a germ. This was what I learned in elementary school. Teachers affirmed white students, seemed able to hear them when they spoke, but the rest of us went unnoticed. We needed to be taught, controlled. I kept wondering how to be pleasing, how to earn the right to be like the others. I hated school, but I loved to learn. School made me feel ill and afraid. I can say now what I could not say as a child. I did not feel safe. I hurt inside every day as I came home from school.

We were drilled into reading the words that told of Dick and Jane. We were drilled into understanding that our worlds were not good enough. It is difficult to start the day and spend six hours of it somehow knowing in your bones that you are not good enough. Such lessons taught us to be silent lest we be seen as unpleasant. Learn more words, more rules for spelling those words, more about how to say those words, how they work. We went home to very different words and sounds of words. Home was where we felt safe once more.

Church, the Hispanic Protestant Church, was where we could express ourselves in art, music, drama, words, poems, jokes, laughter. It was okay with God to be who we were. God was accepting and celebrated everything with us. We were free to be real, to exist, to break out of our prison of silence. There we were visible people. God is the God who sees us.

Invisibility means not being comprehended. In high school, nothing I said in class seemed to make sense. I always felt as though I were speaking about a different subject. I was sharing about my world—one not apparent or evident but invisible. Invisibility makes others blind, unable to see, to trace, to perceive. It leaves them without knowledge, without the power to understand or judge. Prejudices blind us. Blindness means there is no opening. Openness to my person, to my world, was unimaginable. There was no openness when the counselor at my high school saw my fine grades but refused to provide information about colleges or even the process for applying to college. I was the first in my family to go to college. I knew nothing about the process.

Even if I speak English, when I am invisible, there is no sense to what I say, no knowledge of me, no perception of my person, and therefore no receptors to my presence. Others cannot know my warmth or their own incompleteness without me. Their faculties are not fully developed. There is no understanding, no appreciation, no esteem, and no sense of meaning. I make no sense. “This essay makes no sense. The reader does not know what you are talking about.” I had drawn parallels between the experiences of the author of the short story and my own experiences, but the teacher had no way of relating to my experiences. My grade in that class reflected this “no sense,” this having no faculties, no organs for perception, no good judgment, no experience. I was relegated to continue to be invisible, nonexistent. Nonexistence is to have no being. One is not real, has no life, no presence. One has not occurred. I haven’t taken place. I have no past, present, or future. It’s as if God had never said, “Let there be Elizabeth.”

I was given the classical canons of education. I accepted the offer. I appreciated the gift of Shakespeare, the history of the Western world, industrialization, capitalism, democracy, Locke and Hume, Martin Luther and Calvin. I learned to be, to become according to the becoming standards of others.

In seminary, I was told to keep my hand movements during the sermon in an imaginary box in front of me. If I preached that way in my church, people would wonder if I had an impairment that inhibited my movement. I was to preach for no more than twenty minutes. That would mean I hadn’t prayed and therefore didn’t have much of a word from God to share with others. In all of my classes, I kept two sets of notes. One contained the linear thoughts that would get me an A on the exam. The other set contained the integration of one subject with another such as church history with theology or ethics with urban ministry. These interdisciplinary discussions never took place in class. We separated everything into sacred little boxes: two ways of looking at life, two sets of notes to keep my lives flowing alongside each other.

Now I had presence. I was in plain sight, no longer alone but in the company of others. I was perceived as clothed and in my right mind. But I still had no being, for I still spoke of things with the nuances and from the perspective of a world unknown, a reality still not evident. I was still outside the plan of intention of the institutions that taught me.

I decided to declare that my world was and is. It represents a reality. Others merely had not been taught to perceive it. I wanted to make my world present and not absent. Being absent is to be away from one another, distant and out of sight. It is to be lacking. I lack you, and you lack me. Through my words here I want to present, to acquaint you with, another world. This is a world that is not mine or yours alone but a world that is ours. I want to become a gift, an offering to be seen. I want to give myself to you. I will bring before your mind, offer for your consideration, a journey that takes us from the habit of being absent from one another, lacking an awareness of and having an inability to pay attention to one another, to the habit of presence or being.

God presented himself to Moses as “I AM.” “To be” is a verb used to express future time. Presence is “I amness.” I am in Jesus as Jesus is in God, and we are in Christ a new creation brought together in him. This is our future. I wish for my words on these following pages to be a presentation. Presentation is a word used to describe the position taken by a fetus during labor. My hope is that we will create a labor room where we might be born to one another.

Power as Kenōsis

In August of 2001, my daughter was getting ready to go off to college, and at the same time she was celebrating her eighteenth birthday. Her friends were at the house. I always admired how she managed to bring such a diverse group of people together through friendship. They were Korean, Tongan, Pakistani, Mex-Vietnamese, English, Afro-Mexican, Colombian, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim. They played the piano and sang show tunes from their chorus repertoire. They ate hot dogs and chips and salsa.

After several hours the room began to empty, and countless hugs and good-byes took place. I stationed myself at the door as a hospitable host, thanking them all for coming and wishing them well on their own journeys. And then Salma came into my home to pick up her son. She is Pakistani and Muslim and wore a full hijab. Before she left my home I said to her, “I must go to the mosque with you,” and she cheerfully invited me to come with her.

Why had I asked Salma this? For the past two years I had been led by the Spirit to read about Islam and the countries that are predominantly Muslim. My heritage does not consider learning complete until the experiential dimension is included. It was necessary for me to attend the mosque if I was to learn, to understand a world that seemed so different from mine.

Salma became my broker into that world. She is a natural teacher and can tell when something is not comprehensible to someone seeing it for the first time. She would often lean in my direction and explain things in whispers. After my visits, she would extend her hospitality, and we would sit while she explained much to me. She has invited me to many community events and always interprets her world for me. This is a labor of love, and I have done the same for those who wish to understand my Latino world. What have I wished of those who enter? What has been insulting and what has been appreciated? I worked hard to remember so that I would be both appreciative and respectful of Salma.

She meets me at the entrance, introduces me, and secures a safe place for me as a stranger. But she does more. She uses her own place in her world to open up to me my own place there, access to all that I wish. She has gone out of her way to make sure that I talk with those who have much knowledge to impart. She facilitates dialogue between our two worlds, an exchange of ideas and visions for living together in a world in which we build walls by offering false characterizations of one another.

Salma set one rule for our coming together. “I am not going to convert you, and you are not going to convert me.” This was a good rule. It set parameters that eliminated any fears concerning that which was sacred for both of us, our faith. Besides, the Holy Spirit alone converts. I am only a witness. My actions of love would be a witness. Sometimes, we need to till the land before planting seeds in it. She had known Christianity as imposition. This had made the ground hard and unreceiving to the seed of the gospel. Respect would in turn till the ground. After setting her ground rule, Salma gave me the freedom to ask questions. Asking lets others speak first, to tell how they feel, what they believe. This taught me to accept. I was not sure what my prejudices were, but I knew enough to know that they had to be lurking somewhere.

Listening followed asking. Salma poured out her life, and that was like giving me something worth much more than gold. Her faith is so vital, and she lives it as intensely as I live mine. Her relationship to Allah is so real. I focused on what she shared, and I saw the September 11 events through the eyes of a praying community of Muslims who love and preach of loving one’s neighbor. I saw the discriminations against their lives. I listened to the news with new ears and new questions.

One day I saw my own prejudices rush forth within me over the rights of women. I felt the blood rush to my head, my passion. I had to work hard to silence myself and to listen. I listened so hard that day, fighting my “yes, buts,” and I forced myself to see what she was seeing. It was the first time that I realized what it meant to empty oneself of presuppositions. I realized that I could not assume that the words and behaviors of persons meant what I thought they meant. I had to hear them from inside their world. I learned to let go of my guard and to throw off my biases. To do this I let Salma’s world engulf me and enter me and influence me deeply and fully. I was afraid of losing myself, of accepting too quickly and uncritically. I learned to spend much time reflecting, seeing the similarities and differences, the points of intersection between beliefs and expressions of our beliefs. I compared the behavior patterns that were fashioned by our beliefs. I examined my own world from the standpoint of hers and saw how my thinking and expressions had been conditioned by my previous experiences. This allowed me to see the limitations of my own world as well as its gifts and then to appreciate the insights from Salma’s world. We are both free to be ourselves, free to continue to ask and to listen. We can each bear witness to who we are and where we stand without arrogance or a sense of superiority so that neither one imposes but rather offers with humility and openness.

Never have I been so enriched, so challenged to do theological reflection, to search out the meaning of the kenōsis passage in Philippians: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (2:5 NRSV). I have had to identify my own cultural filters and to learn the meaning of respect. Salma and I have made meanings together with integrity and faithfulness to our faiths. They are meanings in a world that names us enemies instead of neighbors. She has taught me the meaning of prayer to her and has asked me what the cross means to me. We have sought out together the meaning of peace, justice, and hope in this time. Together we have found strength in our faiths to seek shalom.

Steve’s Story: Still an Alien

In a quiet, western Chicago suburb called Wheaton, you will find a school called Wheaton College with the motto “For Christ and His Kingdom.” A leading Christian liberal arts college, boasting 140 years of history, the school has produced quality Christian leaders who have left a deep impact on the world, a legacy fitting of the college’s motto. Here, in this place, a boy who used to traverse the streets of a small township in Seoul, Korea, with his rascal friends finds himself trying to teach a few things to the largely mainstream American students whose childhood and adolescent years bear little similarity to those of their professor.

I am that boy, and I teach what for most of my students is their first class with a non-European-American instructor, especially in the non-science disciplines. Students desperately try to respect me as a professor, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: An Exploration and an Experiment
• 1. Three Stories
• 2. Lord of the Nations
• 3. The Wondrous Cross and the Broken Wall
• 4. Salient Theoretical Frameworks for Forming Kingdom Citizens
• 5. Prejudice and Conversion
• 6. Becoming a Culturally Sensitive Minister
• 7. The Formation Process in a Learning Community
• 8. From Hospitality to Shalom
• Conclusion: Living the Biblical Vision
• Index
• Notes